DEV Community: Ryan Dawson

What Motivates Open Source Contributions?

Ryan Dawson — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 15:45:19 +0000

Open source contribution is no longer just for fun or personal interest. Many developers use open source tools in their day job and surveys have found that a majority contribute to the projects in some form. Companies are contributing to open source, especially the tech giants.

(Analysis from Felipe Hoffa.)

Stackoverflow surveys have found that up to 65% of developers contribute to open source and that the percentage is not very different for professional and non-professional developers. These same surveys also show that more and more developers have been contributing in recent years.

There can be multiple motivations for an open source contribution. This makes personal motivations hard to identify from surveys. One is a belief in the value of open source as a practice and a desire to be part of that. Developers are also motivated by personal and career development.

The presence of more personal motivations does not mean that developers aren't in some way getting paid to contribute. Developers who work directly for open source companies are certainly paid to contribute. Developers who work for a company using an open source product may also contribute as part of their day job. A 2016 Survey found that 65% of companies were contributing to open source.

The Open Core Business Model

Ryan Dawson — Sat, 24 Oct 2020 15:21:25 +0000

Commercial open source makes money through open source. A favoured model is Open Core. With Open Core there's an upgrade path designed for a subset of users to become paying customers.

Open core software is funded by a company and the business model requires an paying customers. This means there will often be paid-for closed-source add-ons available for the open source product or a paid-for hosted version.

Many of the most well-known open source software products are Open Core. Examples include Elasticsearch, MongoDB, NGINX, MuleSoft and GitLab and use of the model seems to be growing.

With Open Core, the open source part of the software is free to use. If a particular use case doesn't require any paid-for add-ons, then there’s no need to pay anything. If it does, then users face a choice of whether to buy the add-on or fill the gap themselves. The mix of how much functionality is open and how much is a paid add-on can vary a lot across tools.

(Image from Joseph Jacks.)

Often add-ons are targeted at high volume use cases. It’s common for enterprise add-ons to relate to permissions, security and monitoring at scale. The idea is that companies with smaller usage requirements can get started for free and move to paying only when they’re deriving a lot of value from the product.

The open core model can lead to confusion for users about whether and when their use case might lead into becoming a paying customer. Especially if the vendor is not clear about the boundary between the free and paid. When the differentiation is clear then the prospect of paying for the product later down the line usually doesn't put users off the open source.

Some companies confine their enterprise offering to hosted services. This means keeping the open source free for self-installation, while also offering the exact same functionality as a hosted service.

Some companies charge only for support and services around self-installed open source. In this model the open source and paid functionality is the same. Red Hat, the largest open source vendor, believes strongly in only charging for services and support. Hence we sometimes see criticisms from Red Hatters of the open core model.

My personal opinion is that the open core model can be good for everyone so long as it's done well. But we don't need to get into that debate here. The most important point on Open Core for developers is to be conscious of potential paid upgrade paths when evaluating Open Core tools.

Giants Of Open Source And How They Make Money

Ryan Dawson — Fri, 23 Oct 2020 17:36:03 +0000

Commercial interests are very much part of open source now. Often even when they're not obvious.

Let’s take an example. The Kubernetes project has been a hugely successful open source project with a massive community. There is an open source culture around the Kubernetes project. Nonetheless, there are commercial motivations in the Kubernetes project and there have been from the beginning.

When Kubernetes launched AWS had an intimidating share of the cloud market. The Kubernetes project effectively commodified container orchestration so that workloads could be run on any cloud, not just AWS. This was a victory for consumer choice.

Kubernetes was also a victory for Google, with their managed Google Kubernetes Engine offering then able to grow in market share. It was also a victory for Red Hat and their OpenShift variation of Kubernetes. This success factored heavily into IBM’s acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion in 2019.

That’s worth repeating. A company dedicated to open source was acquired for $34 billion. That’s not a one-off either. Oracle bought open source company Sun in 2009 for $7.4 billion. GitHub’s status as a home for many of the world’s biggest open source projects was no doubt a factor in Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition.

Open Source is big business now.

Docker may have struggled to make money with open source but the opportunity is real. Docker Swarm could have made a lot of money had Kubernetes not won out.

Google's strategy with Kubernetes is similar to its strategy with web products more generally. Google wants to keep the web open and force companies like Apple to follow open standards. The more open the web is, the more users that Google can reach with search, youtube, maps, etc.

More searches translates to revenue via AdWords and AdSense. We can think of chrome and android as funnels into search, Google's biggest earner.

This strategy is called Commoditising the Complement - you strengthen your offering by making a complementary product so cheaply available that it becomes a commodity.

These examples show us direct commercial motivations but often motivations are less direct. There's lots of commercial motivations. Sometimes there's a company selling support for an open source product. Sometimes the commercial aim might just be good PR for recruitment purposes.

The tech giants have a dominant role in most of the most popular open source projects. But that’s not to say that those projects aren’t run with community in mind or that there aren’t ideals in play. Commercial and idealistic motivations are now mixed together.